Thursday, August 26, 2010

TIGER II Redux

This past Friday, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG) submitted a request for $12M USD to the U.S. Department of Transportation's TIGER II discretionary grant program for an expansion of the upcoming Capital Bikeshare service. If won, the funding would provide an 80%/20% (Federal/local) match for an expansion of the service within Arlington and D.C., as well as bringing in four adjacent jurisdictions and a large state university into the program.

Capital Bikeshare will launch in September with 1,110 bikes at 114 stations. With TIGER II funding, the service would quickly expand to 3,578 bikes at 431 stations -- a substantial increase -- as early as next spring, making it nearly as large as Montreal's Bixi.

MWCOG's application and cost-benefit analysis can be found online for other regions to benefit from. While MWCOG was putting together this grant application with the assistance of the jurisdictions, it was great to see the region coming together over bike-sharing and bicycling. With many other transport needs, the region chose this project as being our collective future. Now that's exciting.

The TIGER II grant application is a follow-up to the region's TIGER I grant application last year which was unsuccessful at securing funding due to the high demand of projects for the amount of available funding. Hopefully, this time the application will meet with better luck. It does help to include in your grant application a photo of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, giving a thumbs up on one of your demo bikes, like the photo above.